Some 2.7 billion miles from Earth , the south side of Neptune is in the midst of summer. But, hold on, this isn’t the …
Some 2.7 billion miles from Earth, the south side of Neptune is in the midst of summer. But, hold on, this isn’t the kind of summer we’re used to. Neptune takes around 165 Earth years to finish an orbit around the sun, which means its seasons each dawdle on for 40 such years. That’s about 160 times longer than one of our seasons, and according to new research published Monday in the journal Planetary Science, this isn’t even the strangest part. Unlike our home planet — which heats up in the summertime for picnic days and beach escapades — the azure world seems to be… cooling down? «This change was unexpected,» Michel Roman, a researcher at the University of Leicester and lead author of the study, said in a statement. «Since we have been observing Neptune during its early southern summer, we would expect temperatures to be slowly growing warmer, not colder.» The surprising find comes after an international team of researchers combined two decades’ worth of infrared images depicting Neptune, collected by super powerful telescopes like the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope. Basically, these images can tell what the planet’s thermal conditions are based on how bright it is.
